Samuel Sanders Is Dead at 62; Accompanied Noted Performers

Samuel Sanders, a pianist who was the recital partner of choice of Itzhak Perlman, Mstislav Rostropovich, Robert White and many other instrumentalists and singers, died Friday night at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He was 62 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was liver failure, said Lee Walter, his press representative.

Mr. Sanders was a gregarious musician who looked a bit like Woody Allen and had a quick and often ribald sense of humor that endeared him to the musicians he worked with, several of whom became lifelong friends. But he also regarded the business of accompanying as serious, exacting work, and he was one of the first pianists to insist that an accompanist should be regarded as a soloist's partner rather than as a subsidiary.

When he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School, in 1963, he persuaded the school to establish a master's degree program for accompanists, and he demanded that his name be listed in all advertisements for concerts in which he was to perform, a practice other accompanists quickly adopted. He also campaigned to open the field to women at a time when virtually all accompanists were men.

Mr. Sanders preferred the term collaborator to accompanist, but admitted that it was a clumsy and not entirely satisfactory alternative. Often, he likened his job to that of a catcher on a baseball team.

''The catcher is in on every play, and he really does see the whole field in a way that no other player sees it,'' he once told an interviewer. ''In a sense, that's the position most accompanists and chamber pianists are in. They have the whole score in front of them. Now, the pitcher is the glamour figure. But if there's an errant pitch, the catcher has to be there. I expect the musical equivalent all the time. At the very first concert I ever accompanied, the singer began a Bach aria and immediately skipped a page. My reaction was instantaneous: I went right to where she was. It was a combination of knowing the piece, luck and having good reflexes.''

Mr. Sanders was born in the Bronx on June 27, 1937, and he has said that he would rather have been a baseball player than a pianist. But a congenital heart ailment -- a hole between the right and left ventricles, called tetralogy of Fallot -- made it difficult for his blood to absorb oxygen, leaving him breathless and with a blue pallor.

His heart problem set the course of his life. When he was 9 years old, he underwent an operation that improved his condition, but he remained unable to participate in rigorous childhood activities. It was because of this that his mother bought him a used upright piano and hired a teacher. As an adult, he pursued a robust touring career, but was sidelined several times for open heart surgery, including two transplants, in 1990 and last May.

Mr. Sanders made his New York recital debut at Town Hall when he was 13, and he performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic when he was 16. But he was ambivalent about a pianistic career. ''I was talented, and I loved classical music,'' he said, ''but I didn't particularly love piano music. I didn't even like going to piano recitals. My teachers would drag me along and say, 'Did you see how wonderful those thirds were?' And I could only think, 'Let me out of here.' ''

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

As a student at Hunter College, he took film courses and considered becoming a film composer. But he also began accompanying friends in recitals, among them Mr. White, who had been a child star and was a classmate at Hunter, and he quickly found collaborative performance more satisfying than solo playing. In 1959 he enrolled at the Juilliard School to study with Sergius Kagen, a pianist who had done considerable accompanying, mostly of singers. Mr. Sanders joined the school's faculty after he completed his master's degree.

Mr. Sanders won a special citation for his work with Stephen Kates, the cellist, at the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. By the late 1960's he was performing regularly with Mr. Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Jaime Laredo, all violinists, as well as Mr. White, the tenor, and Paula Robison, the flutist, all young soloists in the early years of their careers.

Other musicians Mr. Sanders worked with frequently include the singers Beverly Sills, Jessye Norman and Hakan Hagegard, the cellists Leonard Rose, Yo-Yo Ma, Lynn Harrell, Jacqueline du Pre and Mr. Rostropovich. He maintained his interest in young musicians as well, performing in the 1990's with the violinists Joshua Bell and Rachel Barton, and Andres Diaz, a cellist. He made dozens of recordings with these musicians. Two of them, both with Mr. Perlman, won Grammy Awards.

Mr. Sanders was an avid chamber player. In 1980, he established the Cape and Islands Chamber Music Festival, on Cape Cod. He performed frequently with string quartets, including the Juilliard, the St. Lawrence and Borromeo, and he formed several ensembles of his own, including Musica Camerit and Zephyr.

Mr. Sanders is survived by his companion, Susan Rothwell, a daughter, Sophie, and a brother, Martin, all of New York.

Correction: July 15, 1999, Thursday An obituary of the pianist Samuel Sanders on Monday omitted a survivor. She is his half-sister, Henriette Miller.